The sky was a rose bowl. The gray, elephant-shaped Hole in the Universe agitated in his sleep, then slept again. Dawn was just breaking when the brute in Bhima stirred. The drums beat louder, but the air grew quiet and full of menace.
In the early morning light, Esthappen and Rahel watched Bhima fulfill his vow to Draupadi. He clubbed Dushasana to the floor. He pursued every feeble tremor in the dying body with his mace, hammering at it until it was stilled. An ironsmith flattening a sheet of recalcitrant metal Systematically smoothing every pit and bulge. He continued to kill him long after he was dead. Then, with his bare hands, he tore the body open. He ripped its innards out and stooped to lap blood straight from the bowl of the torn carcass, his crazed eyes peeping over the rim, glittering with rage and hate and mad fulfillment. Gurgling blood bubbles pale pink between his teeth. Dribbling down his painted face, his neck and chin. When he had drunk enough, he stood up, bloody intestines draped around his neck like a scarf, and went to find Draupadi and bathe her hair in fresh blood. He still had about him the aura of rage that even murder cannot quell.
There was madness there that morning. Under the rose bowl. It was no performance. Esthappen and Rahel recognized it. They had seen its work before. Another morning. Another stage. Another kind of frenzy (with millipedes on the soles of its shoes). The brutal extravagance of this matched by the savage economy of that.
They sat there, Quietness and Emptiness, frozen two-egg fossils, with hornbumps that hadn’t grown into horns. Separated by the breadth of a kuthambalam. Trapped in the bog of a story that was and wasn’t theirs. That had set out with the semblance of structure and order, then bolted like a frightened horse into anarchy.
Kochu Thomban woke and delicately cracked open his morning coconut.
The Kathakali Men took off their makeup and went home to beat their wives. Even Kunti, the soft one with breasts.
Outside and around, the little town masquerading as a village stirred and came to life. An old man woke and staggered to the stove to warm his peppered coconut oil.
Comrade Pillai. Ayemenem’s egg-breaker and professional omeletteer.
Oddly enough, it was he who had introduced the twins to kathakali. Against Baby Kochamma’s better judgment, it was he who took them, along with Lenin, for all-night performances at the temple, and sat up with them till dawn, explaining the language and gesture of kathakali. Aged six, they had sat with him through this very story. It was he who had introduced them to Raudra Bhima—crazed, bloodthirsty Bhima in search of death and vengeance. He is searching far the beast that lives in him, Comrade Pillai had told them—frightened, wide-eyed children—when the ordinarily good-natured Bhima began to bay and snarl.
Which beast in particular, Comrade Pillai didn’t say. Searching for the Man who lives in him was perhaps what he really meant, because certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.
The rose bowl dulled and sent down a warm gray drizzle. As Estha and Rahel stepped through the temple gateway, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai stepped in, slick from his oil bath. He had sandalwood paste on his forehead. Raindrops stood out on his oiled skin like studs. In his cupped palms he carried a small heap of fresh jasmine.
“Oho!” he said in his piping voice. “You are here! So still you are interested in your Indian culture? Goodgood. Very good.”
The twins, not rude, not polite, said nothing. They walked home together. He and She. We and Us.
CHAPTER 13
THE PESSIMIST AND THE OPTIMIST
Chacko had moved out of his room and would sleep in Pappachi’s study so that Sophie Mol and Margaret Kochamma could have his room. It was a small room, with a window that overlooked the dwindling, somewhat neglected rubber plantation that Reverend E. John Ipe had bought from a neighbor. One door connected it to the main house and another (the separate entrance that Mammachi had installed for Chacko to pursue his “Men’s Needs” discreetly) led directly out onto the side mittam.
Sophie Mol lay asleep on a little camp cot that had been made up for her next to the big bed. The drone of the slow ceiling fan filled her head. Bluegrayblue eyes snapped open.
A Wake
A Live
A Lert
Sleep was summarily dismissed.
For the first time since Joe had died, he was not the first thing that she thought about when she woke up.
She looked around the room. Not moving, just swiveling her eyeballs. A captured spy in enemy territory, plotting her spectacular escape.
A vase of awkwardly arranged hibiscus, already drooping, stood on Chacko’s table. The walls were lined with books. A glass-paned cupboard was crammed with damaged balsa airplanes. Broken butterflies with imploring eyes. A wicked king’s wooden wives languishing under an evil wooden spell.
Trapped.
Only one, her mother, Margaret, had escaped to England.
The room went round in the calm, chrome center of the silver ceiling fan. A beige gecko, the color of an undercooked biscuit, regarded her with interested eyes. She thought of Joe. Something shook inside her. She closed her eyes.
The calm, chrome center of the silver ceiling fan went round inside her head.
Joe could walk on his hands. And when he cycled downhill, he could put the wind inside his shirt.
On the next bed, Margaret Kochamma was still asleep. She lay on her back with her hands clasped together just below her rib cage. Her fingers were swollen and her wedding band looked uncomfortably tight. The flesh of her cheeks fell away on either side of her face, making her cheekbones look high and prominent, and pulling her mouth downwards into a mirthless smile that contained just a glimmer of teeth. She had tweezed her once bushy eyebrows into the currently fashionable, pencil-thin arcs that gave her a slightly surprised expression even in her sleep. The rest of her expressions were growing back in a nascent stubble. Her face was flushed. Her forehead glistened. Underneath the flush, there was a paleness. A staved-off sadness.
The thin material of her dark-blue and white flowered cotton-polyester dress had wilted and clung limply to the contours of her body, rising over her breasts, dipping along the line between her long, strong legs—as though it too was unaccustomed to the heat and needed a nap.
On the bedside table there was a silver-framed black-and-white wedding picture of Chacko and Margaret Kochamma, taken outside the church in Oxford. It was snowing a little. The first flakes of fresh snow lay on the street and sidewalk. Chacko was dressed like Nehru. He wore a white churidar and a black shervani. His shoulders were dusted with snow. There was a rose in his buttonhole, and the tip of his handkerchief, folded into a triangle, peeped out of his breast pocket. On his feet he wore polished black oxfords. He looked as though he was laughing at himself and the way he was dressed. Like someone at a fancy-dress party.
Margaret Kochamma wore a long, foaming gown and a cheap tiara on her cropped, curly hair. Her veil was lifted off her face. She was as tall as he was. They looked happy. Thin and young, scowling, with the sun in their eyes. Her thick, dark eyebrows were knitted together and somehow made a lovely contrast to the frothy, bridal white. A scowling cloud with eyebrows. Behind them stood a large matronly woman with thick ankles and all the buttons done up on her long overcoat. Margaret Kochamma’s mother. She had her two little granddaughters on either side of her, in pleated tartan skirts, stockings and identical fringes. They were both giggling with their hands over their mouths. Margaret Kochamma’s mother was looking away, out of the photograph, as though she would rather not have been there. Margaret Kochamma’s father had refused to attend the wedding. He disliked Indians, he thought of them as sly, dishonest people. He couldn’t believe that his daughter was marrying one.
In the right-hand corner of the photograph, a man wheeling his bicycle along the curb had turned to stare at the couple.
Margaret Kochamma was working as a waitress at a café in Oxford when she first met Chacko. Her family lived in London.
Her father owned a bakery. Her mother was a milliner’s assistant. Margaret Kochamma had moved out of her parents’ home a year ago, for no greater reason than a youthful assertion of independence. She intended to work and save enough money to put herself through a teacher training course, and then look for a job at a school. In Oxford she shared a small flat with a friend. Another waitress in another café.
Having made the move, Margaret Kochamma found herself becoming exactly the kind of girl her parents wanted her to be. Faced with the Real World, she clung nervously to old remembered rules, and had no one but herself to rebel against. So even up at Oxford, other than playing her gramophone a little louder than she was permitted at home, she continued to lead the same small, tight life that she imagined she had escaped.
Until Chacko walked into the café one morning.
It was the summer of his final year at Oxford. He was alone. His rumpled shirt was buttoned up wrong. His shoelaces were untied. His hair, carefully brushed and slicked down in front, stood up in a stiff halo of quills at the back. He looked like an untidy, beatified porcupine. He was tall, and underneath the mess of clothes (inappropriate tie, shabby coat) Margaret Kochamma could see that he was well-built. He had an amused air about him, and a way of narrowing his eyes as though he was trying to read a faraway sign and had forgotten to bring his glasses. His ears stuck out on either side of his head like teapot handles. There was something contradictory about his athletic build and his disheveled appearance. The only sign that a fat man lurked inside him was his shining, happy cheeks.
He had none of the vagueness or the apologetic awkwardness that one usually associates with untidy, absentminded men. He looked cheerful, as though he was with an imaginary friend whose company he enjoyed. He took a seat by the window and sat down with an elbow on the table and his face cupped in the palm of his hand, smiling around the empty café as though he was considering striking up a conversation with the furniture. He ordered coffee with that same friendly smile, but without appearing to really notice the tall, bushy-eyebrowed waitress who took his order.
She winced when he put two heaped spoons of sugar into his extremely milky coffee.
Then he asked for fried eggs on toast. More coffee, and strawberry jam.
When she returned with his order, he said, as though he was continning an old conversation, “Have you heard about the man who had twin sons?”
“No,” she said, setting down his breakfast. For some reason (natural prudence perhaps, and an instinctive reticence with foreigners) she did not evince the keen interest that he seemed to expect from her about the Man with Twin Sons. Chacko didn’t seem to mind.
“A man had twin sons,” he told Margaret Kochamma. “Pete and Stuart. Pete was an Optimist and Stuart was a Pessimist.”
He picked the strawberries out of the jam and put them on one side of his plate. The rest of the jam he spread in a thick layer on his buttered toast.
“On their thirteenth birthday their father gave Stuart an expensive watch, a carpentry set and a bicycle.”
Chacko looked up at Margaret Kochamma to see if she was listening. “And Pete’s—the Optimist’s—room, he filled with horse dung.”
Chacko lifted the fried eggs onto the toast, broke the brilliant, wobbling yokes and spread them over the strawberry jam with the back of his teaspoon.
“When Stuart opened his presents he grumbled all morning. He hadn’t wanted a carpentry set, he didn’t like the watch and the bicycle had the wrong kind of tires.”
Margaret Kochamma had stopped listening because she was riveted by the curious ritual unfolding on his plate. The toast with jam and fried egg was cut into neat little squares. The de-jammed strawberries were summoned one by one, and sliced into delicate pieces.
“When the father went to Pete’s—the Optimist’s—room, he couldn’t see Pete, but he could hear the sound of frantic shoveling and heavy breathing. Horse dung was flying all over the room.”
Chacko had begun to shake with silent laughter in anticipation of the end of his joke. With laughing hands, he placed a sliver of strawberry on each bright yellow and red square of toast—making the whole thing look like a lurid snack that an old woman might serve at a bridge party.
“‘What in heaven’s name are you doing?’ the father shouted to Pete.”
Salt and pepper was sprinkled on the squares of toast Chacko paused before the punchline, laughing up at Margaret Kochamma, who was smiling at his plate.
“A voice came from deep inside the dung. ‘Well, Father,’ Pete said, ‘if there’s so much shit around, there has to be a pony somewhere!’”
Chacko, holding a fork and a knife in each hand, leaned back in his chair in the empty café and laughed his high, hiccupping, infectious laugh till the tears poured down his cheeks. Margaret Kochamma, who had missed most of the joke, smiled. Then she began to laugh at his laugh. Their laughs fed each other and climbed to a hysterical pitch. When the owner of the café appeared, he saw a customer (not a particularly desirable one) and a waitress (an only averagely desirable one) locked in a spiral of hooting, helpless laughter.
Meanwhile, another customer (a regular) had arrived unnoticed, and waited to be served.
The owner cleaned some already clean glasses, clinking them together noisily, and clattered crockery on the counter to convey his displeasure to Margaret Kochamma. She tried to compose herself before she went to take the new order. But she had tears in her eves, and had to stifle a fresh batch of giggles, which made the hungry man whose order she was taking look up from his menu, his thin lips pursed in silent disapproval.
She stole a glance at Chacko, who looked at her and smiled. It was an insanely friendly smile.
He finished his breakfast, paid, and left,
Margaret Kochamma was reproached by her employer and given a lecture on Café Ethics. She apologized to him. She was truly sorry for the way she had behaved.
That evening, after work, she thought about what had happened and was uncomfortable with herself. She was not usually frivolous, and didn’t think it right to have shared such uncontrolled laughter with a complete stranger. It seemed such an over-familiar, intimate thing to have done. She wondered what had made her laugh so much. She knew it wasn’t the joke.
She thought of Chacko’s laugh, and a smile stayed in her eyes for a long time.
Chacko began to visit the café quite often.
He always came with his invisible companion and his friendly smile. Even when it wasn’t Margaret Kochamma who served him, he sought her out with his eyes, and they exchanged secret smiles that invoked the joint memory of their Laugh.
Margaret Kochamma found herself looking forward to the Rumpled Porcupine’s visits. Without anxiety, but with a sort of creeping affection. She learned that he was a Rhodes Scholar from India. That he read Classics. And rowed for Balliol.
Until the day she married him she never believed that she would ever consent to be his wife.
A few months after they began to go out together, he began to smuggle her into his rooms, where he lived like a helpless, exiled prince. Despite the best efforts of his scout and cleaning lady, his room was always filthy. Books, empty wine bottles, dirty underwear and cigarette butts littered the floor. Cupboards were dangerous to open because clothes and books and shoes would cascade down and some of his books were heavy enough to inflict real damage. Margaret Kochamma’s tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.
She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic—who forgot the candles, who broke the wineglasses, who lost the ring. Who made love to her with a passion that took her breath away. She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting, thick-waisted, thick-ankled girl. Not bad-looking. Not special. But when she was with Chacko, old limits were pushed back. Horizons expanded.
She had never before met a man who spoke of
the world—of what it was, and how it came to be, or what he thought would become of it—in the way in which other men she knew discussed their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach.
Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them—as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.
As for Chacko, Margaret Kochamma was the first female friend he had ever had. Not just the first woman that he had slept with, but his first real companion. What Chacko loved most about her was her self-sufficiency. Perhaps it wasn’t remarkable in the average Englishwoman, but it was remarkable to Chacko.
He loved the fact that Margaret Kochamma didn’t cling to him. That she was uncertain about her feelings for him. That he never knew till the last day whether or not she would marry him. He loved the way she would sit up naked in his bed, her long white back swiveled away from him, look at her watch and say in her practical way “Oops, I must be off.” He loved the way she wobbled to work every morning on her bicycle. He encouraged their differences in opinion, and inwardly rejoiced at her occasional outbursts of exasperation at his decadence.
He was grateful to her for not wanting to look after him. For not offering to tidy his room. For not being his cloying mother. He grew to depend on Margaret Kochamma for not depending on him. He adored her for not adoring him.